


The Sheet Thing

by 221b_hound



Series: Lock and Key [9]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Hand Jobs, M/M, Sex on Furniture, Sherlock Wearing A Sheet, Tattoos
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-21
Updated: 2016-10-21
Packaged: 2018-08-23 17:11:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,796
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8335705
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/221b_hound/pseuds/221b_hound
Summary: Sherlock, in nothing but a sheet, drapes himself across John's lap. He wants to test a hypotheses: which is, that John understands the entirety of what it means when Sherlock offers himself to John this way, for John to fondle and please him however he likes.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Sherlock referred to "The Sheet Thing" in the previous story, Footage, and wondered if John really got the full significance of it. This is the story of him finding out if John does, indeed, get it.

In the time before he and John become lovers, Sherlock used sometimes to brood around 221B in a sheet and a scowl, so replete with despondent ennui that he couldn’t be bothered to dress. He would be rude, lazy, demanding and brattish, and John, with an aggrieved sigh, would let him get away with it.

In that lonely time before, Sherlock Holmes would spurn the very notion that he ever _wanted_ anyone to _take care of him_. The concept of _taking care of him_ , with its implication that he had a need for fond attention, for _being taken care of_ , was anathema to him. He did not need anyone. He did not have tender feelings. He did not have sensual desires.

_He did not._

That was then. The now of _after_ was different. It was in the After that The Sheet Thing had evolved.

Sherlock was almost certain John understood what The Sheet Thing was about, but the almost was a frustration. Did John properly appreciate the significance, or did he simply think Sherlock was, in the old way, demanding selfish indulgence, more sexual but no less brattish.

And because Sherlock could never help but to test hypotheses, this day he emerged from an afternoon shower, dried himself and then draped himself in a clean white sheet and strode into the living room, where John was watching football.

John looked up. Saw Sherlock standing tall in the sheet, not imperious as a statue but soft and warm, and slightly damp around the edges, like a male Venus arisen from the waves.

John licked his lower lip and smiled.

That was all the encouragement Sherlock needed to swan across the carpet and drape himself on John’s lap, one bare leg hooked over the arm of the chair, the other tucked between John’s denim-clad legs, allowing his knees to fall open, though all was demurely hidden by the sheet.

John brushed his nose along Sherlock’s cheek, nuzzled his temple and kissed the corner of his eye. This done while his right hand slipped into the gap in the sheet, and brushed a gentle, lingering stroke up Sherlock’s inner thigh.

“John…”

John’s left arm, across Sherlock’s back, adjusted the taller man in his lap slightly, so that John could more easily press their mouths together.

“Mmm.” John hummed his approval of the situation as he kissed Sherlock and, beneath the sheet, rubbed the tips of his fingers down Sherlock’s thickening shaft, and then up over his belly. Sherlock’s legs fell further open. John’s left arm gathered him closer, while his right hand brushed Sherlock’s nipples to tight nubs.

“Gorgeous,” murmured John, drawing back a little to see the bliss on Sherlock’s face – the parting of his lush lips, the flush of his cheekbones, the dilation of his eyes. The evidence of Sherlock’s pleasure and desire. “You like this, hmmm?”

Sherlock gasped at the sudden tweak of his left nipple and the soothing rub of John’s thumb after, and he looked sultry-soft into John’s eyes and said, “Yes.”

“Me too.”

John’s fingertips briefly traced the outline of Sherlock’s key tattoo which he couldn’t see but knew as well as the lock tattooed on his own chest, over his heart. Then his drew a line down Sherlock’s sternum, watching Sherlock’s eyes subtly change colour as heat, desire, need changed his breathing and blood flow. Sherlock watched the shape of John’s hand moving beneath the sheet, until John’s index finger completed the line, down sternum, belly, dipping into his navel, dragging through the thatch of tight black curls and down the length of Sherlock’s cock, which bobbed up to meet the touch.

He inhaled sharply as John’s fingertip slid to the tip of his prick and down the other side, leaving a wet trail now from the pre-come he’d gathered from the slit. To his balls. Underneath to his perineum.

He looked up into John’s eyes, then. John gazing at him with an expression half tenderness, half hunger. As their eyes met, John turned his hand, cupping Sherlock’s balls and then drawing the heel of his hand up the underside of Sherlock’s cock. Once the pad of his thumb was pressed to the sticky crown, John wrapped his fingers around the shaft from underneath and gently pulled.

Sherlock gasped softly; almost silently

“Please,” John murmured, and Sherlock responded with a breathy _ah!_ and then a deeper _yes_ as he dug his heels into the arm of the chair and the seat between John’s knees and pushed into John’s curling grip.

John’s _oh_ of approval at Sherlock’s sounds, his movement, prompted Sherlock to drop his head back against John’s supporting arm. One hand he fisted into John’s shirt to anchor him, the other he let fall so he could grip the cuffs of John’s jeans. With his knees bent too, he was splayed out, nominally covered by the sheet, under which John’s hand moved.

Then John released him briefly to push the folds of the sheet aside, and leave Sherlock exposed and wanting in his lap.

“You…” John cupped Sherlock’s balls again, dipped his finger into the warm hollow behind, then between the cheeks of his arse, and stroked there a while, as Sherlock squirmed and panted.

“Are…”

Then John ran his flat palm over Sherlock’s thighs…

“So…”

…along his ribs, and arms and shoulders. Sherlock tensed slightly. The next word would tell him. The next word would show if John understood what this really was.

“Mine.”

John smoothed his palm down Sherlock’s chest and belly back to grip his cock again.

Sherlock grunt-whimpered and said, “ _Yes_ ” with gruff emphasis, as John smeared the pre-come Sherlock had been leaking onto his own stomach up and down the shaft and began to pull again.

This thing with the sheet – Sherlock on random days draping himself in bedlinen, positioning himself to be fondled, played with and affectionately used as John saw fit – it wasn’t a selfish demand. It was a _surrender_. Just like John’s fantasies built towards this place of surrender and acceptance, this was Sherlock offering the same. It wasn’t his way to make up stories about it. He didn’t weave a framework of reasons. He acted.

And this was what he did. He offered himself: not only his body, but his responses. Everything under the surface on display for John to see.

Sherlock wasn’t hiding any more. He was no longer pretending that this love for John, this desire for him, was something he didn’t need and didn’t want.

Sherlock let go of denial and let John look after him, feeding John’s need to do so; and he _let himself be looked after_ , feeding a need of his own that had taken him almost his whole life to admit, and even now he couldn’t put it into words.

 

He put it instead into a sheet, an open and honest expression, a willingness to be touched and petted and pleased and to show, without hesitation or artifice, every bit of what that meant to him. Every bit of pleasure and desire. Every moment of how that moved him, how it made him feel. All those things he hid and denied and refused to feel on the surface for so very long – all right out there for John to see and to respond to.

John’s arm tightened under Sherlock’s back as John pulled him closer to kiss him deeply. His teeth pulled sensuously at Sherlock’s lower lip, scraped over his jaw, and Sherlock made deep, gasping, wanton noises and said throatily, “Kiss me,” and John did.

It made Sherlock’s heart swell and his body sing.

John took everything Sherlock offered as unstintingly as he gave of himself, because this was what they were now. Unedited selves, giving and asking and wanting and having. Their need to surrender to each other met the need for control and found balance.

John squeezed Sherlock’s cock firmly but not hard, and Sherlock threw his head back, held tight to his anchoring places, pushed his heels harder against the chair, and pumped up into John’s hand.

“Yes,” John breathed, “Yes. Show me.” His hand firm around Sherlock’s stiff heat, a slick, sturdy tunnel for Sherlock’s pleasure. John’s hand curled around the back of Sherlock’s neck, another anchoring point as Sherlock abandoned himself to sensation.

And then John’s fist around his cock began moving again, and Sherlock, eyes wide, watched as John worked him, slow, then fast, thumb flicking over the top, squeezing slightly every few strokes.

“Please, please, please,’ chanted Sherlock. They were both watching John’s hand working him, listening to the slippery sounds of it, watching the stickiness flow from his slit onto John’s hand, which he’d release briefly to let it further slick his palm before resuming the rhythm.

Then Sherlock was coming, and he watched the first spurt cover John’s hand before his eyes were closed and he was crying out with the clench of his body in orgasm.

When he opened his eyes, it was to John’s heated gaze on his. To John smearing his come-sticky hand over Sherlock’s thigh, around to his backside so that he could shift Sherlock’s body slightly in his lap, pulling him close. Sherlock could feel John’s erection, hot and bulging, pushed against the right cheek of his arse.

Sherlock sat up, straddling John’s thighs, his sheet fallen to his hips, and stomach and pubes a sticky mess. He took John’s face in his hands and kissed him soundly, deeply, tongue and teeth and with little huffing groans, until John took Sherlock’s face too, to hold him there.

That’s when Sherlock dropped his hands, undid John’s jeans and kneeled briefly until John lifted his hips enough for Sherlock to pull jeans and pants down to John’s thighs.

“You are so mine,” he growled into John’s ear, and John laughed, low and pleased.

Sherlock wiped his hand through the come on his stomach, wrapped his hand around John’s cock and with his clever fingers, wanked John until John, with a rumbling shout, came over Sherlock’s thighs.

They sat for a while afterwards, sticky, dishevelled. Kissing. John slid his hands around to squeeze Sherlock’s arse. Sherlock had shoved his hands up under John’s shirt and was enjoying the sensation of chest hair and nipples on his palms and fingertips. Then John dipped his mouth to lip at the tattoo, now visible on Sherlock’s chest.

Sherlock pressed into the sensation of John’s tongue and lips on the ink of the key, woven with the initials JW. Under John’s shirt, Sherlock’s fingers traced the double headed lock, and the SH inked in the pattern within it.

They never talked much about the tattoos. There was no need. They lived now, what those marks had promised.

They unlocked each other, and they kept each other safe.


End file.
